Wednesday, June 29, 2011

From my previous time at the Assembly, I had learned that everything we learned in high school about how a bill becomes a law is, let's just say for the sake of being polite, "optimistic". After 6 months on the outside, it was confirmed to me that the process is, let's just say, again, for the sake of being polite, "wishful thinking", but I became much more cynical and hurtful/hateful about it all.

After months of pushing reasonable, common sense legislation - the low-hanging fruit of legislation, if you will - and coming up mostly empty-handed, I came away thinking, "Gee, if we can't agree on this stuff, can we ever get anywhere on the stuff that really matters."

There is more inertia in certain houses of the legislature than you can imagine. The coefficient of friction is high in this government, my friends. When is it a legitimate argument in opposition to say, "Well we oppose this because we've never done it before." Typical. But that's not even the best one I heard: "It's too difficult to explain that this is not actually bad." Wow. Stop the presses. This might be too intelligent. Can't have that now, it might make people think too much. True story. So in essense the legislative session went as such.

But it was not all bad - as every surely knows by now, at least every one of my readers, the state Senate passed marriage equality. It reminded me of this scene from Dumb and Dumber. Marriage equality is Harry and the state Senate is Lloyd (starting at :45).